If your risk analyses or evaluations show that the risks on your site are intolerable the law requires you to stop doing what you are doing and do it in a different way.

Risk is a combination of the consequences of a hazard and its likelihood, requiring us to:

Identify the hazards – if we don’t identify a hazard we cannot assess the risk

Decide on the consequences of the hazard – the harm that could come from this hazard

Decide how likely these consequences are to arise

Combine the consequences and the likelihoods to determine the risk which needs to be compared with ‘appropriate’ risk tolerability criteria

But even when the risks are deemed tolerable or broadly acceptable, you may still need to do more to demonstrate that they are as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP), e.g. as required under COMAH.

Demonstration of ALARP can be achieved by considering additional potential risk reduction measures to see if implementation is reasonably practicable, which requires the use of a Cost Benefit Analysis. If the cost of an additional measure is deemed ‘grossly disproportionate’ in comparison with the level of risk reduction achieved then there is no requirement to install it, but the opposite is also true.

At HFL Consulting we have recognised tools and techniques for dealing with all of these issues, delivering reliable results that have proved acceptable to the Regulators over many years.